Bob McArthur has lived in Las Vegas for only a year and a half, but has worked through the wettest monsoon in decades, a rare tropical storm, and the city’s hottest month ever.
The fluorescent “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign juts out from a small turf lawn in the middle of the road at the southern edge of the Strip. It is a loud and chaotic spot: cars rush by on both sides of the sign, planes rev their engines at the nearby Harry Reid International Airport runway, and selfie-stick-toting tourists line up, next to venders hawking bracelets and aguas frescas, to take photos. During the day, there is no shade; in the summer, Las Vegas temperatures regularly top a hundred and five degrees Fahrenheit. “It’s, like, the least romantic place,” Bob McArthur, an Elvis Presley impersonator who officiates weddings there, said. Each year, hundreds of couples tie the knot at the sign.
At 7 P.M. on Labor Day, McArthur drove to the sign to renew vows for two Staten Island couples: two sisters and their husbands. He circled twice to find a parking spot and, in the privacy of his Jeep Cherokee, sprayed Febreze over his bejewelled, white full-body suit, which he’d affixed with underarm sweat pads and had been wearing since 9:45 A.M., for his first of eleven ceremonies that day. The sun was lowering, and it was warm out but not terrible. During July’s record-breaking heat wave, when temperatures in Las Vegas reached a hundred and sixteen degrees, McArthur officiated a wedding on an outdoor terrace—and was relieved when it lasted only a few minutes. Kent Ripley, another Elvis impersonator posing for photos in the parking lot, told me that he’d lost five pounds in the heat. “These suits don’t breathe,” he said.
McArthur, who is fifty-five, has lived in Las Vegas only for a year and a half, but during that time he has worked as an Elvis impersonator through the wettest monsoon in decades, a rare tropical storm, and the city’s hottest month ever—July, 2023. The heat causes spikes in emergency-room visits and temperature-related fatalities, and it also permeates the quotidian. People wear gloves to hold steering wheels, try to remain indoors, and avoid touching metal benches and doorknobs.
For performers, who are at the heart of Las Vegas’s tourist-based economy, the heat shapes their work in subtle, uncomfortable ways. One d.j. told me that he always brings backup thumb drives of music files in case his computer system overheats and the signal chops up. A singer said that the city’s heat gives her a rough, dry cough in the beginning of the summer, and she keeps two humidifiers running in her apartment on a regular basis. For McArthur, who wears a tight-fitting polyester suit and an oppressive wig, even working inside chapels can be a drag during the height of the summer. He knows which wedding chapels have the best air-conditioning. At one chapel, whose break room is stuffy, he brings his own standup fan.
Miraculously, despite the previous week’s tempestuous and extreme weather (a hundred and eight degrees one day, severe monsoon flooding the next), the couples who’d arranged to have their joint vow renewals at the “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign lucked out: it was only eighty-five degrees that evening. The sisters, Barbara Reno and Lynne Pellecchia, arrived in a limo with their husbands, Thomas and Giuseppe. They wore matching outfits: the men in light-teal Hawaiian shirts and white shorts; the sisters in white summer dresses and sashes reading “I Still Do . . . 28 Years Later,” to commemorate the number of years since their weddings, which were six months apart. Before the vow-renewal ceremony, they played roulette at the Aria Resort and Casino and bet on the number twenty-eight, which they hit on the third spin. They won eight hundred and seventy-five dollars.
Despite the relative coolness of the evening, McArthur was still hot. In a suave baritone voice, he sped through his Elvis-themed script. At his request, the men told their wives, while lassoing their right arms suggestively, “I’ll always be your hunka hunka burning love.” The women chanted, “I’ll never step on your blue-suède shoes.”
The couples said their vows, which were barely audible over the din of traffic, and McArthur pronounced them married, again, “by the powers vested in Elvis, the state of Nevada, and RCA Records.”
After he sang a truncated a-cappella rendition of “Love Me Tender,” and a Little Chapel of Hearts employee took a flurry of photos with a cell phone, the ceremony ended. It had lasted a matter of minutes.
McArthur was done for the day and needed to get home to interview a potential cat-sitter. When the couples were gone, he ripped off his black wig. Underneath, his scraggly brown hair was soaked.
In 2008, McArthur began visiting Las Vegas to attend look-alike conventions. “I heard for years from other Elvises who lived here that there was no work,” McArthur told me. He’d been performing at back-yard parties and nursing homes in New York and Miami for twenty years; his interest in Elvis Presley stemmed from childhood, when he watched the rock star’s last concert on television and became fixated on how the crowd worshipped him. McArthur grew sideburns, dyeing them black to go with his wig and naturally blue eyes, and over time bought more than a dozen Elvis suits, the most expensive of which cost twenty-two hundred dollars. When he finally moved West, in 2022, he found, contrary to the other Elvises’ warnings, a surfeit of work at wedding chapels.
For McArthur, even working inside chapels can be a drag during the height of the summer.
On an average day, McArthur, whose Web site bills him as “the busiest celebrity impersonator in Las Vegas,” drives from chapel to chapel across downtown Las Vegas, and usually works between five and ten weddings (his record is twenty-three) in a row as a contract officiant and singer. He is friendly and energetic, and, when people compliment his singing, he responds, “Thank you, thank you very much.” (“You’ve got to respect the character,” he told me.) At a public library, he sang Elvis’s greatest hits to a fawning middle-aged audience and invited a four-year-old Elvis impersonator with smooth dance moves onto the stage, to the delight of the child’s grandmother, who described herself as the “nanager.” At the Viva Las Vegas chapel, he accompanied a couple from Michigan as they rode in a pink Cadillac; the bride told me that she’d worn spray-on makeup and a strapless wedding dress for the heat.
On a recent weekday, I visited the Graceland Chapel, in downtown Las Vegas, which offers Elvis-themed wedding packages starting at two hundred and forty-nine dollars. McArthur gets his most regular gigs here, sometimes one every fifteen minutes, and makes eighty dollars per session. At 10 A.M., it was ninety-seven degrees out. In the chapel lobby, the air-conditioning was blasting, and bouquets were set inside a refrigerator. A limousine driver and I commiserated about the heat. Because limos have so much airspace, he said, they’re always a little warm for customers.
McArthur officiated his first wedding of the day, which was for an Italian couple. It was done in seven minutes. “This is a conveyor-belt chapel,” he told me in the dressing room, which had Elvis suits hanging from the walls, as he sipped an iced matcha almond-milk latte, the only thing he’d consume that morning. Normally, McArthur, who tries to be vegan, doesn’t eat breakfast, for fear his tight suit won’t fit, and because he’s trying to lose weight. He opened a black makeup box, which contained a travel-sized Febreze bottle, breath spray, throat-coat spray in case he lost his voice, Q-tips, spare rings, an extra pair of Elvis sunglasses, and wig tape. After a few minutes, he was beckoned back to perform the next ceremony.
McArthur was supposed to only work three weddings that morning, but the Elvis taking over for him was running late. In total, he worked eight. They were all nearly identical, with slight variations. The bride would walk down the aisle with McArthur, face the groom, and smile. McArthur, or a Spanish-speaking officiant, would run through a script, inflecting here, pausing there. The couple would exchange rings. (If they were renewing vows, some struggled to remove the rings from their fingers. “It’s the desert weather,” McArthur said to one man, generously.) McArthur would sing, and usually end on the upbeat “Viva Las Vegas.” The couple would dance. Cara Gostovich, the photographer, would tell them to kiss, bejo, bacio, bise, and shoot photos with Elvis.
“Every fifteen minutes,” Gostovich sighed. “It’s photography boot camp.”
Sometimes, McArthur told me, his mind wanders during the ceremony, and he thinks of what he’s having for dinner that night.
Then he snaps back, trying to be present. Each ceremony provides a small glimpse into people’s private lives, and the wedding-chapel workers have seen the gamut. Drunk weddings, shotgun weddings, people who have been together for twenty-five years, eighteen-year-olds who have been together for not that long at all. Couples renewing their vows after five days. “There’s the ‘I done fucked up’ renewal,” Gostovich said. Sometimes a partner is terminally ill. “There’s a lot of reasons people get married.”
Two days after I watched the Graceland ceremonies, Las Vegas flooded. Rain pelted for hours on Friday and Saturday. Cars were swept away. Children in my neighborhood boogie-boarded down rushing street gutters. At least two people in the Las Vegas Valley drowned.
It was a dramatic end to the summer. In June, temperatures had been far below normal; in July, they soared far above. Monsoon season arrived late, reviving anxiety over the region’s twenty-year-long mega-drought. When the rain finally did come, it fell hard and fast, slipping off the surface of the concrete in the city and the dry soils at its outskirts. One wedding chapel lost electricity, and McArthur had to officiate a ceremony with a portable audio system and a set of candles. The air was thick and heavy, a rarity for Las Vegas, where humidity in the summer usually hovers around twenty per cent.
On Saturday, I sloshed through floodwater to see a wedding at a chapel downtown. Inside, a trash can collected dripping rainwater from a leak in the roof. The bride wondered if a pool party hosted by a well-known d.j. would be cancelled because of the rain. She and the groom were originally from Venezuela; she now lived in Mexico, and he lived in Florida. “My family is dying because they didn’t think I was ever going to get married,” she said.
The ceremony, like all others, was swift: songs, ring exchange, photos. Elvis impersonation is a dying profession, McArthur told me. Like him, most of the impersonators he knows are more than fifty years old.
As for why he still gets a lot of work, he told me that it’s because he’s “normal.” He considers himself a laid-back, friendly guy, with a life outside his performance; that night, he was going to a party for locals who couldn’t make it to Burning Man, which, this year, was a flooded, muddy mess. When McArthur takes the wig off, he’s not Elvis anymore—and he doesn’t want to be.
He’s just Bob. “Some of the Elvises we have here have these huge egos,” Brendan Paul, the owner of the Graceland Chapel and an impersonator himself, said. “I want to tell these guys: you’re not Elvis, you morons.” ♦
https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/an-elvis-impersonators-summer-of-extreme-weather-weddings
